Addonics brings DIY NAS to the masses

NAS is a complicated-sounding acronym, but for media enthusiasts, it’s a must. A NAS is a Network Attached Storage device, or a gigantic hard disk connected to your network onto which you can dump terrabytes of music and video files (and anything else you’d care to add).

Most dedicated NAS devices are not cheap, though. However, the gloriously sounding Addonics company has just released its own device that lets you take any existing USB hard disk and turn it into a NAS device in its own right, letting you share your existing hard disks with your entire LAN (and even across the Internet).

Think of is as a DIY NAS Adaptor – or NASA, for short!
The Addonics NASA, then, comprises a 10/100Mbps Ethernet port that you plug into your Ethernet socket, and a USB port, into which you plug your external hard drive, or even a USB printer.

Any machine on your network (i.e. that’s connected to your switch) can then access your hard drive, turning it instantly into a NAS.

If your switch is connected to the Internet via a router, then machines can retrieve files from your hard drive from the Internet via FTP.

How can they do this? The NASA isn’t just a dumb USB-Ethernet converter, you know – this things has brains! Specifically, it has a built-in FTP server that external clients can communicate with, as well a BitTorrent client, which lets you suck up your media from the Internet and dump it onto your new NAS device, even without any PC being left on controlling things.

Better still, the Addonics Nasa even has a UPnP server, meaning your dumb hard drive can share its media with other UPnP-equipped devices such as an XBox 360 that are also connected to the network.

Perhaps best of all, though, is the price – just $55 for a tiny box that lets 64 people share your external hard drives, and gives you a dedicated NAS from an old external hard drive that you only used occasionally. Genius!